Continuidad y discontinuidad en “Casabella” y en “Spazio”. Las revistas de arquitectura de Luigi Moretti y Ernesto Nathan Rogers en el Milán de la década de 1950 · Continuity and Discontinuity in Casabella and Spazio. The 1950's architecture magazines directed by Luigi Moretti and Ernesto Nathan Rogers

Can architecture magazines play a role in theoretical thought? What tools do they employ? A comparison of two Italian magazines, Spazio and Casabella, published in Milan in the fifties reveals their importance. It also provides relevant insight into the tools architecture uses to communicate, the text-image relationship, and how architecture relates to other artistic disciplines and history itself. In Italian architectural circles, Luigi Moretti and Ernesto Nathan Rogers are acknowledged masters, embodying the capacity to reformulate and articulate a new kind of architectural education. Certainly, neither of them set out to re-establish a systematic theoretical discourse on architecture. They did not attempt to distill their thoughts into some grand unifying theoretical opus. Instead, for them, the magazine was their medium of transmitting criticism and open-minded inquiry. Comparing the iconography and criticism of these two Milan magazines clearly reveals the two editors share strong communication skills and are able to convey a strongly proactive (one could even say theorybased) message, yet without falling prey to the constraints of academia or formulaic essay writing. In this, they are helped by a shared passion for the explicit freedom of the photographic image, often heavily cropped. However, the impact is quite different: with Luigi Moretti, his iconic architecture, while rarely published in the journal, nonetheless remains in the back of our minds. In contrast, Rogers, ever the educator, seems to have entrusted the pencil to his young, up-and-coming contributors.